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An Indian site, YourStory, has an unusually broad ranging interview with Richard Stallman. While much of the background and goals will already be familiar to SN readers, the interview is interesting not only for its scope but also that India is starting to take an interest in these matters.
To know Richard Stallman is to know the true meaning of freedom. He's the man behind the GNU project and the free software movement, and the subject of our Techie Tuesdays this week.
This is not a usual story. After multiple attempts to get in touch for an interaction with Richard Stallman, I got a response which prepared me well for what's coming next. I'm sharing the same with you to prepare you for what's coming next.
I'm willing to do the interview — if you can put yourself into philosophical and political mindset that is totally different from the one that the other articles are rooted in.
The general mindset of your articles is to admire success. Both business success, and engineering success. My values disagree fundamentally with that. In my view, proprietary software is an injustice; it is wrongdoing. People should be _ashamed_ of making proprietary software, _especially_ if it is successful. (If nobody uses the proprietary program, at least it has not really wronged anyone.) Thus, most of the projects you consider good, I consider bad.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 30 2017, @09:11PM (4 children)
Most people really want security, comfortable enough living, and leisure time, and everything else is a vague desire that you'd be perfectly happy without.
Considering that we almost never see people actually stop working for more, even when they're billionaires, I'd say this is mostly false.
Personally, if I could have security, reasonable comfort, and leisure time, but I had to live with 20 roommates in an apartment, and while it had a pool it was very crowded and had a lot of kids' pee (and some floating turds) in it, and while it had some gardens, there was lots of litter in them, I wouldn't be very happy at all. I'd want more space. My own private forest and all the rest is just the logical extreme of this.
Now you could argue that I wouldn't demand *so* much space and exclusivity if I lived with people who behaved well and shared my standards for cleanliness, but that's a utopian fantasy. The more people you put into a situation together, the more chances for conflict arise, to an exponential degree.
(Score: 1) by ants_in_pants on Wednesday August 30 2017, @09:34PM
I see that every day. Focus on the worst of humanity and you'll see the worst.
Doesn't sound very comfortable to me
Logical extremes are famously not representative of reality
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday August 31 2017, @08:51AM (2 children)
Billionaires are statistical outliers. I know quite a few people who work freelance and don't work as much as they're able to. When I was consulting, once I'd made enough to cover my cost of living for a tax year and fill up my tax-free savings allowance, I shifted entirely to doing fun projects. Some of them were paid, some weren't, and all the payment did was rearrange the order of things on my todo list.
I suspect that part of the reason people keep working is that they don't realise how quickly they hit diminishing returns. When I was growing up, someone told me that there was a logarithmic relationship between income and quality of living and everything I've seen since supports that. Earning ten times as much provides a linear increase, but for most people working ten times as hard isn't possible.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday August 31 2017, @10:40AM
Anecdotally, I work because I enjoy what I do and people around me are generally pleasant and appreciative. My wife was in a situation where the people around her were not pleasant or appreciative so she moved job.
I heard an anecdote about a friend of a friend who worked a supermarket checkout because she wanted to get out of the house and she liked the people she worked with. She didn't need the money, but appreciated the discipline that a job required (e.g. it gets a bit depressing spending every day lazing around til noon then mooching around town until the bars open).
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday August 31 2017, @11:42AM
Billionaires don't work for money, they work for the game, for competition. Money is just the points of the game.
They say that someone asked J.P. Morgan
MAN: How much did you pay for that yacht?
J.P.MORGAN: Forget it. You couldn't afford.
MAN: Excuse me. You can't know that.
J.P.MORGAN: Yes, I do. Because you asked how much it cost.
Usually billionaires live with much less than the could afford. They are workaholic, not luxuryaholic.